Yes that can be done on both Icewm and XFCE, without much hassle at all.

And i've thought about that idea. It's just the flexibilty of the solution. You can only have the icons going vertically and however you try the xfce panel can never look as cool as something like awn.

It is a good thought and it will provide a good interface for a touchpad screen. but i'm not sure it would make the user interface easier for a newbie.

to my opinion, you're all right, buttonbars help, to make things clearer.

but i think, puppy with jwm has enough 'features' to do so in a very minimal way.

as mentioned before, making a buttonbar is simple (as i'm able to ). and also mentioned before, jwm is able to have 2 panels. in combination of this, one is able to have a fully configured panel with buttons to launch the self-created buttonbars.

the advantage of this way: you don't need additional apps, just some icons and some ideas, which groups/apps should be started with the buttons from the panel.

as an example, i've attached a picture of my desktop. there are 2 buttonbars, the shutdown (adapted from the ice-wm-shutdown)is started by the poweroff-button from the upper panel, the other one for my gmpc/mpd is started from the menu.

CatDude
I'm glad you like the flyout trays. I didn't realise anybody was actually using it. One thing to note is that it uses jwm 1.8 which requires slightly different configuration tags to 2.01. I did look yesterday at porting the patch to 2.01 but it is going to take a couple more hours than I have free at the moment. I did write a script which parses your .jwmrc and creates a set of trays for all the menus items.

Your strikes of genius all over this forum never cease to amaze me. Great work.

These are all good suggestions, but i'm really looking to create an entire environment on the desktop, rather than use the taskbar. I'm not saying stop using the taskbar, i'm saying bring the menu items onto the desktop in a well formatted Linpus / eeePC like fashion. I guess i'm looking to replace the ROX pinboard with a tabbed interface.

So HairyWill, how would you go about creating an app like the eeePC's UI or Linpus Lite's, that just sits on top of the desktop (leaving the taskbar still there, but without a menu)? Obviously it might need a bit of bling , so i guess it will be more gtk / qt / fltk toolkit stuff?

I think the choice of toolkit makes no difference to the application, though it would seem silly to require users to install extra libraries. On that basis gtk or raw xlib would be sensible choices. Well written xlib is I believe much less costly in terms of resources.

Richards gtkdialog bars could get very close to what you are looking for. It depends on how import bling is to you. It is easy to remove the window manager decorations for specific apps in your jwm config and you can vary the button size. Instead of one program consider 4 of them each with the same row of main buttons at the top to select the category and exactly the same size. Under this is a set of buttons that applies to the current category. When you hit a particular category button it kills the current window and loads the new one in exactly the same place. You could use one program to generate the different windows dynamically.

I think the design questions are more interesting.
Should the panels/buttons be user editable?
Do you want the panel to die when it loses focus?
Should it be running permanently on a lower z level to all the other windows?
Would it be better for it to be launched from a great big drop down button at the top of the screen.

There are lots of ways of redesigning your environment to make it more efficient for you. It is more difficult to ensure that these methods are intuitive and work for others, especially if all they are used to is windows. linux abounds with all sorts of weird and wonderful window managers which work really well if you know ow to use them

Personally I don't have a big screen. Many of my applications are running full screen so I don't see the desktop very often. That is why I liked the flyout trays because all they needed to start a new app was a fairly linear mouse movement and a single click.

good luck

Aragon
All of the current 3 and 4 series puppies use jwm 2.01. You can replace jwm in them with mine or a conventional jwm 1.8. It will still work but the windows will all have red borders and titlebars and you will not get gradient colours. On the plus side you will be able to resize your windows from the top. There are a few other minor functional differences. I'm not sure if 2.01 squashed any major bugs.
Instead of overwriting the jwm at /usr/X11R7/bin/jwm you could just copy the modified one to /usr/bin where it will get found first. When you have had enough just delete it and the original will get used._________________Will
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one idea: have you looked at wbar? i used it with fluxbox, i think it's very nice.

if !?! wbar has the ability to start with different config-files (what i don't know), you could use will's idea with wbar (little bling).

wbar 1: the groups
wbar 2: audio
wbar 3: office
wbar 4: ...

if you choose audio wbar 1 closes and wbar 2 opens in the same place. if you start f.e. xmms from audio it closes wbar 2, starts wbar 1 and then starts xmms. in every "group"-wbar you will also need a back button which closes the "group"-wbar and starts wbar 1 again.

Personally I don't have a big screen. Many of my applications are running full screen so I don't see the desktop very often. That is why I liked the flyout trays because all they needed to start a new app was a fairly linear mouse movement and a single click.

Mate those fly-out trays are also a feature of Gnome and I've used them to great advantage. Been around a long time, Sun's Java Desktop System was the earliest system I saw them on and that's design era was about 2002 from memory, though I think they were part of Gnome before then.

They are really a sort of dynamic version of what this article was originally written about, and will work from horizontal or vertical panels (taskbars). Great for moving everything off the desktop except then you have more than one click needed to launch something which makes it less attractive ergonomically. (I used to customise AutoCAD menus with productivity in mind).

You can also add fly-out trays to fly-out trays - which sounds strange, but this can be useful to group associated products together.

Off Topic
Just a thought too. You can free up memory if you need to, by making your desktop bare, particularly of busy wallpaper of many colours. This is an old tip from Windows 3.1 days with (if you were unlucky) only 16 Megs of slow RAM.

Richard_________________Have you noticed editing is always needed for the inevitable typos that weren't there when you hit the "post" button?

Mate those fly-out trays are also a feature of Gnome and I've used them to great advantage.

I didn't realise that, though I think I got the inspiration from something I saw in enlightenment.

richard.a wrote:

Great for moving everything off the desktop except then you have more than one click needed to launch something which makes it less attractive ergonomically.

what I have written is strictly one-click. It works in the same way as other jwm auto hidden trays. There is a one pixel border at the edge of the screen that enables the tray when you mouse over it. The flyout trays have small gaps in between them so that if you slide your mouse along the edge of the screen it also launches a conventional hidden tray. This sits underneath the flyouts and can be used to provide a first level menu to find the other trays. The buttons on the first level menu don't have any action associated with them they just provide a visual clue.

richard.a wrote:

You can also add fly-out trays to fly-out trays - which sounds strange, but this can be useful to group associated products together

I think this would be hard to do with jwm

I have upgraded my mods to be compatible wth jwm 2.01 jwm flyout trays. At the moment I am running it with 50 pixel high buttons. These aren't particularly pretty as they use the icons in the jwm menu which are only 16 pixels high but this could be fixed by a pack of icons in $HOME/.icons. Before writing this I did try an icon launcher written by MU but it did require the extra click and was a bit slow, these babies are like $^!t off a shovel. _________________Will
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I didn't realise that, though I think I got the inspiration from something I saw in enlightenment.

I notice that Mint (which is a green tinged ubuntu with Gnome and many goodies) has it too; was playing with panels in a Mint I managed to install on one older computer (usually a no-no, ubuntu 5 is about the latest I've got going in most of them). The usual right click to add apps, menus, whatever and the trays are a choice of what you can add in the menu. In Gnome you can simply change icons for the trays by using the properties right-click, so it's all straight forward and integrated.

I rather like trays because you can still do a single click, albeit a long duration one by holding the button down and sliding over the functions you don't wish to use and releasing the button over the one you want.

The rest of your post is very interesting; however with older machines, I haven't explored recent JWM and the recent puppy versions that use it because recent puppies won't work on many older boxes.

Wondering if it possible to retro-fit later JWM versions.

And completely off topic, I dislike the XDG menu concept. Nobody ever needs more than one menu system at a time, surely? Let's face it, nobody complains about the plain looking bars and menu in ubuntu... and if you have to have KDE, then you get the K version - Kubuntu.

I've been working on several adaptions of the bars for specific purposes, and I suppose it's what you become familiar with really... but I think it is such a simple way to do things, and so easy to modify on-the-fly if you need to change something._________________Have you noticed editing is always needed for the inevitable typos that weren't there when you hit the "post" button?

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